21 September 2010 1:08 PM

Could the last one out the stadium please turn out the lights?

At the launch of the new season, Mark McCafferty, the chief executive of Premiership Rugby, was explicit in setting out his ambitions for the growth of the domestic club game.

New interpretations of the law had made the game more entertaining and the fans would follow, voting with their feet and their wallets. If rugby’s attendance figures could continue to grow during the long winters of discontent, imagine what could happen now the game was fun to watch again.

Premier Rugby’s long-term ambition is for average attendances – 13,745 in the Guinness Premiership last season – to outstrip football’s Championship (18,106 last season and the fourth most-attended football league in Europe) inside five years. Given the steady upward curve of crowd numbers, that seemed ambitious but attainable.

Until the beginning of this season. Disregarding the show games – the Twickenham double-headers and Wembley spectaculars that boost attendance figures and bump up the average unrecognisably each season – clubs are suffering from relatively poor ticket sales.

Wasps failed to sell-out AdamsPark (a fairly modest ground in the first place) when taking on arch rivals and defending champions Leicester. Welford Road itself had more than 6,000 empty seats for the Tigers’ season opener against Exeter and Bath could fill only 200 of the 1,500 extra seats put in over the summer for their season debut against London Irish.

Maybe the Leicester faithful weren’t that interested in seeing their champions take on Exeter, as most were expecting the Premiership new boys to be on the receiving end of a round kicking. But at the Rec, it was a top of the league clash between arguably the two most entertaining sides on a crisp, sunny afternoon. Were Bath fans checking out the new shopping plaza down the road instead?

Television figures are not a source of comfort either. Last season, the Super League convincingly and consistently beat the Premiership in terms of attracting viewers (frequently doubling the union audiences during simultaneous transmissions). Meanwhile it is no reflection on the quality of ESPN’s coverage to point out that if fewer households around the country have access to the channel, viewing figures fall further. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.

When the Ashes left terrestrial television and moved to Sky, the popularity of cricket suffered. The 2005 series will always be remembered not only for the quality of the cricket, but by the fact that the entire nation found themselves caught up in the drama because it was available to every television owner in the country.

Hopefully these latest attendance figures are but a blip in rugby’s rise. The majority of last season was unarguably tough to watch, even for those getting paid to do so, and when audiences pick up on the fact that the sport is back to where it should be, they will be back in their thousands. Won’t they?

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A very interesting revelation came from Martin Johnson at Twickenham last week. Full of praise for the GPS tracking system the Elite squad now wear in training (measuring everything from speed and distance to the degree a player’s shoulder leans during a change of direction), he said that during England’s warm-up before the first Test in Australia this summer, some members of the team had covered more than 1.5km.

Thanks to this expensive piece of kit (it comes at £2,000 a pop) the coaching team realised this supposed warm-up was more of an overheat and duly changed tactics. They reduced the warm-up significantly in the second Test and you know what happened next.

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As the amateur rugby season kicks off in earnest around the country this weekend, it seems an appropriate time to mention an iPhone app that is taking grass-roots level rugby by storm. Rugby enthusiast Gordon Brown has designed and developed the free app Rugby Scorer – a simple but effective way of keeping track of play during a game. It’s not only being used at amateur level – rumour has it the Australian Women’s rugby team were on their iPhones during the recent World Cup. No need to sharpen your pencil on a Saturday morning anymore.

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